Haulin' with the Porteur Rack
I’ve written about the Porteur Rack that Alistair made for me before, but I used it a couple of times this weekend and just need to rave about it again.
Last night it hauled my polo mini bike back and forth to polo. Yup, a bike on a bike. Sorry, I didn’t take any photos.
When Igot back from the Fremont Solstice Parade I found apackage from USPS sitting on my porch — it contained a nice”The North Face” messenger bag that BOB list member Geoff sent me. I loaded up thebike and headed down to the homebrew shopfor making a batch of hefeweizen. I rode down with about 20# of grain and came back with about 32# of grain (16# ground, the rest isn’t being used for this batch). The messenger bag works great on the porteur rack.
Here’s what it looks like when riding:
Drop handlebars do get in the way, so I can’t go with loads too much bigger than this. Alistair recently rode home with some huge floor pads for his workshop on his porteur bike with Albatross bars:
These things are great. I already have a huge mental backlog of racks to build and two of them are porteur racks (one for my tandem, one for my IvyCycles/Rohloff bike). I’m going to try commuting with the messenger bag + porteur rack for a few months and see how that goes. It might be the best mix of a briefcase/laptop style pannier and handlebar bag.
This is exactly what I want a porteur for. I plan on using midge bars on the porteur. They”re wide with very short and shallow drops, I”m curious how they”ll cooperate with a large load on a front rack.
Better link (HTML doesn”t work in the comments):
http://www.63xc.com/mattc/midge.htm
If the Midge Bars are wide enough between the hoods then I think they”ll work at least as well as the Noodle bars that I use. I”ve tried widely flared drops in the past but they just aren”t my thing.
A smaller front wheel or a higher handlebar position also makes drop bars less of a disadvantage. I still have dreams of building a porteur with a 20″ front wheel one day.
Alex,
looks great! How was the minibike polo? What did you dig up for a bike?
Minibike polo has been great. I put some photos of the polo bike and my new porteur rack in today’’s blog post:
http://blogs.phred.org/blogs/alex_wetmore/archive/2007/06/25/lot-s-going-on.aspx
Photos of the bike on the bike are in there too…